How to make the most of your online presence
All small businesses need to know how to create a consistent online presence. Only 54% of small businesses currently have a website, and in today’s world to create an effective online presence you need so much more to attract potential customers.
As a small business owner it is very easy to feel overwhelmed by all the different online opportunities available, so to help out, here are some of the most common mistakes to avoid.
1) Ignoring local search engine optimisation (SEO)
97% of internet users search for local businesses online, which means that as a small business you cannot afford to ignore local SEO and its potential benefits.
Local SEO helps you attract customers who perform searches for a particular location, such as “plumber in Grantham”. By optimising your site for local queries, you are helping customers discover your business and your services. Therefore reaching a new audience that’s interested in the most appropriate search results for the particular area.
The best ways to boost your local SEO are:
- Verify your Google My Business listing: Google My Business connects your business with customers. Once you verify your page you can update your name, address, phone (NAP), add the right categories for your business and a relevant description. This helps customers find more information about your business, increasing the chances of attracting more visits.
- Embed a Google Map in your website: A Google Map that links to the Google Plus local listing allows your business to offer all the required information to its customers.
- Optimise meta tags and page content for local keywords: It can be beneficial for a business to add the city and the county in the title tag and the meta description to increase the clicks derived from local search results.
- Use consistent contact information across your online profiles: It is important for every business to maintain a consistency of its contact information on every online source, from its site to its social networks, or Google My Business and Yell.
2) Not having an accessible site for the modern connected user
More and more customers are using their mobile phones or pads to run searches, whether that is someone looking for the nearest restaurant or a business owner using a spare 10 minutes between meetings looking for a new supplier. According to a survey from Google, 72% of mobile users consider it important for a website to be mobile-friendly.
If a potential customer can’t read your website the chances are they will just cross you off their shopping list and you have lost that customer forever. In fact, a mobile-friendly website increases the chances of conversion and similar results occur when focusing on optimal site speed.
Even a 1 second delay in a website’s loading time can lead to a lost conversion of 7%, while 40% of users will abandon a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. This makes it imperative that you regularly measure the performance of your website to examine the best ways to reduce its loading time.
3) Not taking advantage of customer reviews
Online reviews have become an important part of consumers’ purchasing decisions, with 88% of them trusting reviews as much as personal recommendations. The more reviews a business has, the higher the chances of earning trust among new customers.
As a small business owner you should encourage your customers to either leave a review on your website or social media pages or ask them to write a testimonial that you can then use wherever and whenever you want to.
Even the negative reviews can be helpful and you should embrace them, building a trusting relationship with the prospective customers, while working towards improving its performance. As online reviews still count as fresh content for a website, they can also contribute to an improved SEO, with review signals accounting for 9.8% of the total ranking factors that define a page’s position on search results.
4) Not joining up your activity across online and offline.
There is a growing challenge for small businesses expanding their online presence to ensure that their personality, messages, and offers are consistent across all their customer communication whether online or offline.
For example; A prospective customer may receive a communication from you through the post, they will then go online to check out your website to find out more. If what they find doesn’t match what they have already seen and hence their expectations, they will end up confused and very likely to dismiss your business.
5) Not communicating with your customers
It’s vitally important for a business to understand its audience, as this will guide it towards future commercial goals.
A business with a good online presence pays attention to its customers and listens to their needs to become genuinely helpful. There’s more chance of increasing sales when businesses seek authentic relationships with existing and prospect customers.
The goal of building an online presence is to get closer to where the customers are and build meaningful, tangible engagement. Two-way communication between your business and your customer, all the way from initial user experience to any method of contact can only be a good thing.
These mistakes may be common, but they can all be fixed with a series of small steps in the right direction. And if a small business is feeling too daunted by these steps, there are many local companies devoted to helping them strengthen their SEO.
